Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Monday May 07, 2012 @06:50PM
from the but-officer-the-car-was-driving dept.

Fluffeh writes "On Monday, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles approvedGoogle's license application to test autonomous vehicles on the state's roads. The state had approved such laws back in February, and has now begun issuing licenses based on those regulations. The state previously outlined that companies that want to test such vehicles will need an insurance bond of $1 million and must provide detailed outlines of where they plan to test it and under what conditions. Further, the car must have two people in it at all times, with one behind the wheel who can take control of the vehicle if needed. The Autonomous Review Committee of the Nevada DMV is supervising the first licensing procedure and has now approved corresponding plates to go with it, complete with a red background and infinity symbol."

My guess is because the license will be granted with the understanding that it's a research vehicle. Someone will likely want to be closely monitoring the output of the car's instruments, so this insures one guy can do that while the other focuses on the road.

If there wasn't this requirement, one guy could conceivably monitor the instruments and not pay attention to the road since the car is driving itself.

If there wasn't this requirement, one guy could conceivably monitor the instruments and not pay attention to the road since the car is driving itself.

Yet half the drivers on the roads in Las Vegas, Nevada are TALKING ON THEIR CELL PHONE instead of paying attention to the roads! Even after it was made illegal! And many of them can't even maintain a normal speed or sometimes even lane position! Nevermind being able to react to anything around them.

Well yeah, that is kind of a given around the country, or probably the world. In almost every scenerio I would imagine the self driving cars will outperform real drivers, but the first major accident will lead to a large amount of controversy where people are judging are these things safe on the road, even if their miles/accident ratio is 1/100th of a humans. I suppose that is humans natural inclination to prefer when faced with risks, a statistical 5% chance of killing themselves from their own fault, over

I'll agree with the flying part, but I have yet to see any report on gun safety that doesn't use confirmation bias when reporting that owning a gun is more dangerous than not. 99.999% of all incidents where a gun is used to thwart an intruder is never reported. Most of the time the gun owner doesn't even know it happened, or the gun that thwarted the intrusion wasn't even in the house that it thwarted the intrusion for.

Here, cars might as well be driverless as a staggering fraction of the drivers should never be licensed any ways. I figure the driverless car is likely a lot less likely to cause the kind of traffic accidents that are caused here every day by the ones with drivers in them, and also less likely to injure me or any actual skilled driver either.

1. It is not driverless as there has to be a driver behind the wheel at all times.2. From the term "driverless license" it seems that they are comparing it to a "driver's license" which is not true. What is actually being issued is an "autonomous testing business license and license plates:.

It is a license to test autonomous vehicle under very strict guidelines.A much better headline would have been "Google gets license to test autonomous vehicles on Nevada roads"; less flashy but much more accurate

Human: "Holy crap! Computer! You're driving in the oncoming lane!"Computer:...Human: "Stop! Abort! Cancel! Computer -- release your controls!"Computer: "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that. I'm detecting that you have an elevated heart rate, which in humans is consistent with high levels of stress. Humans under stress tend to make poor decisions. Many humans have reduced their stress levels by listening to Brahms' music. May I suggest you purchase one of:

As the sign on the back of the vehicle in the article shows it's "self driving". This is not as driverless or autonomous as has been applied to airplanes up till now. If / when cars like these are available to purchase, that's a big difference. This is essentially autopilot, though a pretty advanced one with collision avoidance. Airplanes have had autopilot for decades now, and they are viewed very differently from AUVs or drones.

The State of Nevada does refer to them as autonomous though. The requireme

How long until Google decides all of the self-driving cars they've tested and people have used for 7 years with no problems need a massive overhaul and they decide to completely re-do the API interface unnecessarily, completely breaking usability for everyone, causing the cars to be impractically difficult to use and resulting in possible accidents?

Given Google's track record with the new GMail interface change, I can't say I'd be comfortable sitting in a car running their software, ever. You just don't

Given Google's track record with the new GMail interface change, I can't say I'd be comfortable sitting in a car running their software, ever. You just don't change software that's business-critical willy nilly like that. You just don't. Ever.

Oh man, using an infinity symbol probably seemed such a cool idea when the high tech-ness of it all impressed the authorities. But you know it's going to be a pain when the next generation of even more high tech even more whizzy road vehicles comes along. Oh heck, they'll need plates with "Infinity plus one" . Doh! Bad idea:-)

So why the hell do we allow Google to release non-working beta software on the internet?

Because:(1) Google's "non-working Beta software" often works better than software from other companies that purports to be ready for general release,(2) For most software purposes on the internet, there isn't the kind of immediate public safety concern that justifies regulation of what vehicles are allowed on public roadways.

Why do we allow them to blatantly violate our privacy and sell our information to advertisers? It's time for the government(s) to step in and do something about them.

Insofar as thee have been actual credible accusations of privacy violations at Google, governments -- both in the EU and the US -- have stepped in.

If you have information on cases where that has not occurred, you should provide specifics, rather than vague handwringing.

Though, preferably, in an appropriate place -- even if you had a point, without some nexus beyond a connection to the same company, it would still be off-topic in a thread on Google's driverless car technology.

Google needs to be shutdown, or at least they need to be made to change their blatantly obvious and abusive business. And if they refuse, the CEO's and higher level people need to be put for jail for their violations.

As a pretty firm believer in the principal of legality as opposed to the rule of lynch mobs, I'd like to see some credible evidence that the "CEO's and higher level people" actually committed offenses for which jailing is the punishment prescribed by law before accepting that they ought to be put in jail.

No, I don't, because I opt out through the use of Ghostery (I do use GMail, though, but all those parts are exactly identical to any other third-party email host). As far as the Android thing goes: I'm pretty sure someone would have noticed if they did that. You know, given that they make the source available and you can get root access on many of the phones and all that.

Again, who forced you to use Gmail or buy an Android phone? Nobody. Your problem isn't that your data is being mined, it's that other people don't care as much as you do. Boo fucking hoo. Keep ranting on the interwebs, though, I'm sure that you'll soon convince everyone how evil Google is...

Avoiding Google on the internet is as simple as installing a couple plugins and not using any

Is the TSA putting a gun to my head. No. I can choose not to ever leave my house. Is Google putting a gun to my head? No... I can choose not to use the internet.

You are comparing apples and oranges. You are not given a real choice with the TSA. Considering how integral flight is to today's society, the choice between not flying and getting felt up and/or irradiated is not a real choice. You can't go to another airport/terminal that is willing to treat its customers better because the TSA is government enforced. If you remove the requirement, the TSA would probably disappear and be replace with private counterparts that treat the airlines' customers much more reason

While I don't share the paranoid viewpoints of some, your argument fails from the outset. Google may not be holding a gun to my head, but a poorly designed AI car can certainly cause as much damage as a pistol (if not more) Let alone the damage that could be caused if poorly designed AI cars achieve fleet numbers.

That said, I trust Google on this one (well, Google plus the powers that be along the approval process) Putting out a shoddy product in this venture would cause a Torches and Pitchforks riot th

While the worries are somewhat understandable, I think people are becoming a little hysterical over this. There have been dangerous "death-trap" cars on the roads since the beginning of the automobile. Clearly it is a danger that society is willing to accept, and AI controlled vehicles will be no different. People were terrified of the first cars on the road, too, and we laugh about that shit now, just as I'm sure our children and grand-children will laugh hysterically at the thought of society being ter

We trust computers to fly us around in metal tubes 35,000 feet above the earth at speeds of hundreds of miles an hour and are comfortable with the fact that, statistically speaking, we're going to be just fine. Of course it needs a little work before it's perfected, but nothing is ever going to be 100% perfect.>

Exactly, in the case for self-driving cars, the AI just needs to be statistically as safe or safer than human drivers for me to accept them. Actually, considering the advantages, I would even accept almost as safe as human drivers. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time these cars hit the mass market one of the three would be true.

I hate these practices too. But google is hardly alone on this. Pretty much every software I have used has a disclaimer that say, there is no guarantee that the software will work and they are not liable for any damages.

I hope the FTC takes interest and clamps down hard on such practices.

I see you are still singling out Google. You just confirmed that you are a shill.

So, why the hell do you use Google's non-working beta software when you can find released software on the Internet? Why the hell do you give them your personal information to sell to advertisers? It's time for *YOU* to step in and do something about them.

Logic isn't your strong suit, is it? Any AI Cars that join the ranks won't be in addition to other cars, they'll be INSTEAD of other cars.

This 'logic' only works if the AI drivers drive exactly the same. It doesn't and they won't There will almost certainly need to be a software update or two once they start becoming fairly common. Additionally, people will have to learn to drive with these guys on the road. Afterall, by your own admission, they must drive differently than humans, otherwise they couldn't achieve that goal of being better than humans on the road.

They've earned your hope, but they haven't earned your faith. They still have

As far as I can tell, from the perspective of a fellow motorist, the only two differences between this car and any other vehicle on the road are the drivers' hands not being on the wheel (which I see every day anyway)...

That's actually a pretty big difference. Even if these cars drive just like a human does (i.e. with tinted windows, nobody would ever know the difference...), just the idea that that's a computer controlled car will affect other drivers. I'm willing to bet that these cars will advertised that they're automated all over the car. Getting back to my first point, in the beginning it'll be "us vs. them". That lack of trust will make a huge difference. As it i

I was already shocked when I read about Google Goggles and the way the device works.

Google Goggles isn't a device at all, its software that's available for various devices.

It doesn't process the image on the device itself but instead sends it to Google's servers.

Uh, yeah, it advertises itself as an image-based version of search. Next thing you are going to be surprised that the Google Search app doesn't do the search locally on your device, but sends the search terms to Google's servers.

Combined with Google's facial recognition technology and patent, Google Goggles will give the company outstanding amount of living world and meatspace data.

"living world" and "meatspace" are the same thing.

And it would give them the same amount of information as with the facial recognition technology without the patent, which is a red herring.

Now I can only guess that Google is trying to expand their privacy violations to roads, driving habits and your everyday life.

So? Aside from revealing your personal biases, what value do you think your unsubstantiated guess in this area provides?

And what, exactly, makes you think you have any privacy, or expectation of any privacy, on public roads?

I think the answer has already been given by the SCOTUS in the warrantless GPS tracking case: see here [wired.com] for details. The SCOTUS decided that, even though drivers used public roads, the amount of tracking the police was doing was orders of magnitude above the normal expectation for a public place, both in individual tracking and in the sheer number of trackers that could be active simultaneously. Of course, the decision in this case applies to governments, but I believe the same arguments work identically for

What answer? Attaching devices to your car was obviously illegal! How about the real problem: plate readers, which can easily achieve total surveillance of road traffic. But a ruling against those would raise questions about the millions of other government cameras monitoring the public. And at this point questioning those is simply not going to be allowed.

except gps is probably an integral part of the nav system of the driverless cars, and to avoid and anti privacy claims to use the car it will probably have clause in what ever you sign when you buy the car that you accept their tracking you.

Google has been testing fully autonomous cars in the Bay area for years without any incidents. I would hardly call it 'beta' in the sense of beta software. There's also a requirement that two people be in the car while it's running. It's not as if Google will let hundreds of these cars out on the streets of Nevada with nobody inside to stop them. Not only will Google have $1 million in liability coverage, the lives of two of their own employees per vehicle will be on the line. I'm not too worried about them

I understand your aversion to Google knowing everything about you, but you can soon lay your fears to rest. Once CISPA is law, you'll have absolutely no privacy anymore, even if you totally avoid Google. Companies will have total legal shielding about sharing your information with any government agency that asks for it. Even your local dog catcher will be able to find out anything they want about you.

I used to think that every time someone posted "shill", etc they were just being paranoid but seriously, this is just now getting beyond a joke.

You have 6 posts - all of them anti Google, on a brand new account. Honestly; how dumb do you astroturfers think people are?? If you're getting paid to do this, you're wasting your client's money. At least try and be vaguely opaque about what you're doing. Posts like this are an insult to our collective intelligence and a complete waste of your time and resources

In all seriousness, this (and other insurance fraud) won't be an issue. The cars are instrumented to the gills, and I'm sure in the case of any accident they can dump the data to show that what the person is claiming is impossible.

My personal feeling is that insurance rates are going to drive the adoption of self driving cars. Once the insurance companies realize that they have a lower error rate than humans (never tired, drunk, distracted, etc) and that they can tell who was at fault in an accident (almost certainly the other guy) you'll see serious incentives to keep cars in auto-drive.

Why would he be particularly immortalized? For example if you're looking for the first human to be killed by robots, you don't have to wait for "I, robot" to become reality as that happened already back in 1979 [wired.com]. Doesn't mean that robots have went away, people are quite regularly maimed or killed for neglecting safety zones, getting caught in presses and grinders and such. My prediction is that the first person killed by a computer-controlled car will be a Darwin Award winner that would have been killed by a human driver too, had there been one. Don't get me wrong, a computer-controller car won't be better than the people who programmed it and it surely will have bugs, but that one can be refined and get better whereas today every year we let loose a new generation of unskilled teens on the road.

Perhaps the best analogy is healthcare, you know those life-and-death situations you'd think keep everyone on their toes constantly. Well, nurses and doctors are humans too and they make mistakes, not often but they do. Electronic systems that make sure people always get the right medication in the right dosage at the right time, that they don't get dangerous combinations or medicines they're allergic to has helped save lives. Start counting the times the system corrects the nurses versus the times the nurses corrects the system and you'll find out who is actually the more important part of the two.

And that's why I think computer driven cars will win out in the end, they will always stick to protocol. They'll obey all speed limits, keep distance to those in front, always change lanes cleanly, always signal, always yield, always drive defensively and eventually all the accidents that don't happen because a human was tired or angry or sloppy or fiddling with the radio or his phone or whatnot will outperform the "creative" thinking capability of humans. Our ability to make good split-second decisions in an emergency situation is overrated, not to mention the choices are rather limited to break, turn and possibly in a few situations give gas. Many people panic and actually make it worse than just slamming the brakes.

I expect these cars also will have the ability to record near-accidents which you can use for analysis, you don't actually have to have an accident. Here we just managed to perform an emergency brake for a pedestrian who suddenly walked out into the road, could we have done better? Was our response optimal given the data we had? I see a whole new level of preventive improvement possible here. There's no significant learning for me from having one incident every decade, but if you can collect thousands of situations from millions of drivers it can learn to handle the 0.01% situations that we never have any training for or guidelines for what to do.

And by "always" you mean "until a manufacturer realizes that you can get ahead by trusting other automated cars to err on the side of caution", right? And pretty soon we're having automated cars trying to drive as agressively as possible as yet another demonstration of the tragedy of the commons.

And by "always" you mean "until a manufacturer realizes that you can get ahead by trusting other automated cars to err on the side of caution", right? And pretty soon we're having automated cars trying to drive as agressively as possible as yet another demonstration of the tragedy of the commons.

How would they "get ahead" by doing that? I don't see why programming your car to go faster than the speed limit, or not doing ANY of the things parent mentioned, could benefit the company in any way. My guess would be that it would be illegal to sell a car that did that (similar to how it is illegal to do a lot of those things for human drivers), so advertising that your car did that would be out of the question. It likely wouldn't be any cheaper to design that way.

Do you drive on the same roads as everybody else? The ones with cars that have 400+ hp just to go to the store? The ones that have had their ECUs reprogrammed or rechipped to allow greater boost or better acceleration?

Shortly after automated cars are permitted hit the roads, third parties will have devices that will allow occupants of the vehicle (can't call them drivers any more) to override speed and distance allowances either because people want to get to their destinations faster or just because they c

Yes, I drive those roads. It probably won't be all that common. Just think it through all the way (I thought like you did, and then I followed my thoughts to their conclusion). It probably will (and should) be illegal to make those modifications to your cars "control system." If it is decided that all automatic cars should go no faster than whatever the speed limit is and there is a way the cars know this limit, then making modifications that bypass this will likely be illegal, as the only purpose is to

As long as you carry a million dollar insurance bond? Somehow I don't think that will cut it. New business opportunity, instead of itinerants washing peoples car windows they can offer to drive them to a location of the vehicle owners choice.

No extra insurance, use cell phone, sleep and, drink what ever you like. Now a lot of itinerants have mobile phones, as it is their only hope of getting any kind of work, so web site to book cleaner drivers at specific locations and specific times and minimum wage au

Generally, an emergency would be that last time you should take over. A production quality auto-driving car is going to be better at handling an emergency than 90% of people. And many emergencies can happen to fast for a human to change focus like that.

You cant be serious. The only reason I dont drive is because I hate driving, especially commuter hour traffic. I consider driving to be one of the most mundane tasks a human has to perform (Ironing clothes comes a close second). In a driverless car, I can read the morning news, while I commute. At somepoint, it would become really reliable, that the car would drive on its own anywhere. It would take children to school on its own, come back pick up my wife and get her to work, come back and pick me up for wo

If it were programmed to stop fi it doesn't know what to do it simulates tourists quite nicely. On a more serious note: even if it would it would still be possible to program it to be a way better driver than the average human, watching some of the traffic here in NL. Probably even better than a select few.

1. Increased safety. Did you know that in the US, 1 out of 9,000 people die in a car accident each year? That is freaky high. Over a lifetime that works out to almost a 1% chance. Autonomous cars can be much safer, are never distracted and never get tired.2. Increased access. Folks who are blind or have other disabilities cannot get around by car. Same for older people or people to young to drive. Same for drunk people..3. Increased productivity. A car can be your office. Get work done or spend time doing personal reading.4. Increased fuel efficiency. Autonomous cars will eventually have the ability to work together to draft and save gas milage5. Decreased costs. Autonomous cars will eventually lead to services where you do not have to buy a car. Simply pay for a ride and have a car show up when you need it.

If you are arguing that you and I have a less than 1% chance of dying in our lifetime because we have already survived a number of decades, I agree. But my point is that if a person born today has a 1 in 9000 chance of dying in a car crash each year and this person would otherwise have lived to 80, the odds are pretty close to 1% that he or she will die in a car crash.

Ok, let me try another example. Imagine flipping a coin. The odds are 1 in 2 that you'll get heads. So you flip once and get tails. You're math indicates that the next probability of getting heads is 1 in 1. However, the real probability of getting heads on the next coin flip is still 1 in 2. Each time you flip, the probability is independent of the previous times you flipped.

Yes, I agree. If I have a coin with a 50-50 chance of heads or tails, then my 50th flip is also a 50-50 chance. Howevevr, the odds of

I cannot say when the majority of cars will be driverless, but I can say the technology is darn near close to ready now. There have been enough real world tests to show that it does work. I think the only thing remaining is to get the cars into the real world. Are there risks? Yes. This is why Nevada required the driver and passenger for the near future. The original poster (may be you, may not be) suggested that even this very controlled rules would mean he would not even travel to Nevada. That i